I hope you all are enjoying the new year. I had so much fun at FUDcon getting to know as many people as I could and participating in your wonderful Barcamp and Hackfest. You were all very welcoming and showed much welcome interest in my research project.

Now, it’s time to start ramping up my research again as the spring semester gets into full swing. I’ve prepared a short FAQ to refresh your memories, and/or introduce myself to those who haven’t heard of the project before.

I’m looking for research contributors!

I am looking for people who would like to participate in the study by being interviewed. These interviews will take place over IRC [Freenode]/email/IM/Skype/Phone/Video Chat or even face-to-face if you are local to the DFW Texas area!

All you need to do to qualify is be a Fedora contributor. I am looking for interviews from everyone including but not limited to: developers, ambassadors, designers, QA people, documentation people, and sys admins. This list also includes those who work directly for Red Hat.

The interview process will take at least 1 hour depending on how fast you type, and could potentially last longer.

Here is my informed consent notice:

Informed Consent Notice

The purpose of this research study is to learn more about the development of open source software in an online environment by asking about your experiences and opinions related to working within the Fedora Project community. You are being asked to participate in an online interview that will take about 1 hour of your time. Answering the questions in the interview involves no foreseeable risks. While there are not likely to be direct benefits to you for your participation, it is expected that the results of this study will assist my client, Red Hat/Fedora by helping to reduce turnover and provide ways to better accommodate current community participants as well as identifying ways to attract new talent to the project. Participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time without penalty. By answering the interview questions you are giving consent to participate and confirming that you are at least 18 years old. Results of the interview will be reported only on a group basis.

If you have any questions regarding this study, please contact master’s in applied anthropology candidate, Diana Harrelson Martin, at diana [@] cyber-anthro.com / 214-405-5355, or Dr. Christina Wasson, Department of Anthropology at (940) 565-2752. This project has been reviewed and approved by the University of North Texas Institutional Review Board (IRB). You may contact the IRB at (940) 565-3940 with any questions about the rights of research subjects. You may print this Notice for your records.

For all those wishing to participate, you will also need to download the informed consent form, sign it, scan it back in, and send it back to me before we can even schedule an interview. You can find that form here. Please review it and ask me any questions you may have!

I know not everyone reads the list, so please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think may be interested in participating. I will also be posting to various Fedora mailing lists and my Fedora wiki page about this opportunity. If you can think of any place else this should be posted, pelase let me know!

For those under 18:
If you wish to participate, I will need you to not contact me directly. Instead, I need you to direct your parents to this page and have them follow the directions there to enable you to participate. They may also be receiving communication from Red Hat to do the same.

For everyone else:
If you are over 18 and would like to contact me directly about participating, please email me at diana [@] cyber-anthro.com or find me on IRC under the nick anthro-diana!

6 Comments

Is there an option to digitally sign the contract (with your GPG key, or something like that)? We seem to be able to do it for the Fedora CLA, though I’m not sure exactly how that works out legally – and I’m guessing that if people don’t have to step out into the physical world to print/sign/scan, you’ll get a much, much larger and broader pool of respondents.